Ageing

I consider myself a well-seasoned traveler. I’ve logged many miles, for business and pleasure, both in the States and abroad. Except for ski club trips, I’ve always traveled on my own or with one or two people from my inner circle (BF, family, good friends). I frequently noticed these large groups of people get off big motor coaches and file through tourist sites listening to their guide using some kind of headset. They are kind of hard to miss. I scoffed at them, haughtily at times, thinking they looked like lemmings blindly following their leader. Then I took a 6-day Road Scholar trip to Yellowstone National Park and it totally changed my mind.Continue reading →

This post is a tribute to friendship and a testimony to how women’s lives have improved in my lifetime. This year, 2016, I turned 70 and so did many of my friends, including my college room-mate Maxene. She was given a surprise party by her husband, who asked all of the guests to write a letter, poem, or story to be bound in book as a gift for her…an appropriate gift because Max is very close to publishing her own book, a memoir. Of course, I went to her party. Flew to Atlanta on Labor Day. This has been a hard year for my friend, she has struggled through many months of health issues, which alone was a big reason to be there for her. But, more importantly, Max and I have a lasting bond, a connection that I share with no one else.Continue reading →

My mom has been living “independently” in Preston Pointe, a small senior community in North Carolina, for eight months …and (to her own surprise) she is loving it. She came here reluctantly with great fear and trepidation, agreeing to stay only three months as an escape from the harsh New York winter. This was quite brave of her, approaching 90, unsteady on her feet, and very hard-of-hearing, having never lived anywhere else and leaving all her friends and some family to do it. I did my research but had no experience with these type of facilities so I had my own set of doubts filled with nursing home nightmares.

Turns out, it was a good choice and worth the effort. We are both very happy with the arrangements and I encourage others to consider this option for their parents.Continue reading →

AutoCorrect, love it or hate it? This week, the New York Times Magazine had a short feature about it. Me, I mostly love it. I am a lousy, self-taught typist. I went to high school in the “olden days” when men were men and women were girls. Only the students in the secretarial track took typing classes. I wasn’t one of them.

I truly love AutoCorrect when I am typing something on a full computer keyboard and it fixes all the common typos for me; “teh” automatically becomes “the”, and “studnet” is transformed into “student” before I realize my mistakes. A god-send! On more complicated choices, some programs flag the suspect word and let me choose the correct spelling. Wow, even better!

But when I am texting, this exuberant love diminishes. I make more mistakes texting because the virtual keyboard is small and my fingers often miss the key, and because I text while distracted — cooking, on line in the grocery store, in the car (but only while stopped). I also use acronyms and texting abbreviations, which aren’t always recognized. Unless I intervene, the correction provided in a pop-up balloon is not a suggestion but the actual replacement. I often miss the opportunity to stop it and touch “Send” too soon. The results varies from helpful, to confusing, to hilarious. Sound familiar?Continue reading →

It is well known that in the bird world males are the flamboyant, colorful characters, sporting bright plumage and singing about their assets to attract the less conspicuous females. I envy those lucky chicks who can hide in the foliage, quietly watching and judging all the song-and-dance routines before making their choice for this season’s nest-mate.

In the human world, we gals don’t have it as easy. Sexual attraction is our burden, much to the delight and profit of world’s fashion, cosmetic, and perfume industries. It’s even worse since medical technology joined the party. If we are no longer satisfied with the effects of putting paints, dyes, bleaches, lotions, and chemicals on our bodies, we have more options; we can enhance our bodies with “cosmetic” procedures, many of them surgical, some of them dangerous. The list of what women can do — and are really implored to do — to appear sexually attractive is quite long, starting with a little lipstick and ending god-knows-where in the realm of breast augmentation, facelifts, and tummy tucks. A chirpy song-and-dance routine seems simple by comparison.Continue reading →

April passed in a blur and I only made one blog entry. I had good intentions. First, I was going to write about the tree sperm that descends in a yellow dust storm every spring. I had just discovered that it has health benefits and wanted to share this knowledge (as my nose ran and eyes teared). But then I got too busy with my mom’s trip to NY to celebrate her 90th birthday. I am her primary care-giver and nothing is easy at her age. I was happy to help. She had a wonderful time at her party.

Next, I wanted to elaborate on a recent Facebook post and write about the challenges that working at home poses for an extrovert like me. Judging by the FB comments, there are valid (and comical) opinions both sides. But, this fell in priority when she became ill; coordinating her health care and our return flight was all-consuming. Just when I thought life might return to normal, she went into respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital.Continue reading →

Decumulation is a real word and, as expected, it means the opposite of accumulation. I’ve found, in the economic world, it involves the movement of investments from growth to income. The parallel in my non-economic world is the movement of possessions…from more to less. Here, decumulation involves the reduction of what we have amassed to something that approaches what we truly need. Like all diets, decumulation is a difficult, even painful, process. Right now, my mother is struggling with decumulation. Moving from her townhome into a much smaller apartment in a retirement community; she no longer needs or has room for 90% of her possessions, yet it truly grieves her to part with them.Continue reading →